What does this mean for startups, small businesses, & enterprises?

I think it's going to be weighed much more heavily towards the small startups, entrepreneurs, and smaller businesses initially. In the past you had to spend many months, if not years, of validating a problem before launching it and hoping that users arrive and convert & upgrade, start using it, etc. And now with no-code, that barrier to entry is a lot lower. The speed of all that and the number of people involved is significantly cut down by having tools like Webflow where you can now validate that idea.

I fundamentally believe that only 10% of all the SaaS services have been created so far. I think there are so many more that are kind of locked away right now because it's so hard to build.

For enterprises, it’s going to take longer to catch up to that mentality, because they have much, much larger requirements for what an initial version of something needs to do, right. So they need to carve out smaller use cases, maybe it's a tiny landing page or a marketing experiment where they can start to enter the no-code space. But overall, it's going to be an obvious solution to more and more workflows, especially as the tools mature. Because just like spreadsheets, right, there's so many things that used to be built by code that are now solved with just spreadsheets. And you can see this is increasingly becoming the case with Airtable and other sort of workflow automation tools that look like a spreadsheet.

I think the exciting thing is you can start to see a lot more tech enabled businesses move a lot faster. There's so many businesses [...] you know, small restaurants, you think a small real estate agent, you think of an attorney or accountant or all these sorts of just service industry businesses or small mom and pop stores that have back office needs.

No code lets them run such an efficient shop, which is really important, even more so now than ever, because they have to find ways to be scrappy, and endure through some of these tough times. I think no code really is about putting the power in the people's hands to make things happen.

Just getting started entrepreneurs is who I get to work with a lot. So I just see a lot of those folks, who previously thought that they had to put their idea on the back burner because all they could do was pay $20,000 to have someone build the app for them, or spend like a year or more learning how to code — those are the options. So for them, there's a big incentive to learn this and that's really exciting.

For enterprises, I remember when I worked at Google, I spent so much time building out dashboards on marketing and operation teams, building out dashboards and hacking Excel and different tools to create things and being able to build internal tools like that, I think is a second greatest opportunity. I think it just requires a bit more buy-in at large enterprises.

For entrepreneurs, I think it allows you to move fast and get really far for a lot less money. And you can get to a validation point. So I think we'll see way more startups launch. At the same time If you build something in a couple of hours, the emotional attachment might not be as strong so it's easier to let go. So I think we'll see lots of more lots of experimentation and lots more creativity.

As far as the other two groups, most businesses have some component of a booking system or something like that that can be automated. No-code will enable a lot more quicker things so you don’t have to spend time on the repetitive stuff. There's so much time wasted with companies like copying data from this spreadsheet to this spreadsheet. No-code just replaces the boring parts of people's jobs so that they can be creative on the bigger, better parts of their job and strategy and everything else.

For entrepreneurs, I believe that we're going to see a completely new type of entrepreneur because of the accessibility that no-code platforms give them to validating ideas. If anything, you're going to have smarter, more efficient entrepreneurs, and better ones.

For small businesses, I believe that no-code coupled with really powerful infrastructure behind it enables them to compete with essentially the next question, which is enterprises. So if anything, it's leveling the playing field for small businesses to compete with large market companies.

For enterprises, it allows them to act like a small business or entrepreneur in the sense that they can move more nimbly, they can test just as quickly and now they're not shackled to eight to 12-month builds where by the time you get something out the original idea is already outdated.

I would say recruiting for enterprise companies has been very difficult given, like the bureaucracy and timeline. So if anything, I believe having cooler technology within an organization will enable them to recruit really great talent and make enterprise sexy again.

I think for startups, it really just lets you get your first product built much quicker than you would have been able to do before. When I started Adalo, it took me about seven months before I actually had a product shipped that had real users on it. And I think that obviously took a little longer because we were building no-code tool. But, I think that that will go down so much. I know that there're companies, already, that have built tools with Adalo that have shipped their products weeks after getting started.

For small businesses, they will be able to build apps themselves that can be useful for various things — like restaurants can build ordering apps, and stores can build curbside pickup, and things like that. But I think there's also going to be a whole segment of startups that serve their needs a lot more specifically, because it's cheaper for those startups to build products.

I think that within larger enterprises, there's a lot of things that people want to do and there's a lot of initiatives that various teams want to build, but they just have never gotten the development resources to really do those fully. So as a result I think it enables them to do interesting things that they wanted to do for a long time and kind of that — what you would call a digital transformation, but just things that aren't the top of the spear.

You can start a business for cheaper, you can iterate faster, you won't have to raise money as early or its easier than ever to bootstrap businesses without investors.

The other benefit of a no-code platforms is that, for all different types of businesses, you can focus on being good at your core business — you can skip becoming an expert at all things software if that isnt important.

Further, the ability to create personalized software is super interesting and something we don't talk about enough. What if people could create their own personalized CRM, their own personalized sales workflow, their own personalized warehouse management tool, their own personalized order delivery platform? Would they rather create their own rather than use someone else's off the shelf platform that's not quite true to their business? We'll see.

Finally, for many builders inside of large companies, we hear that they don't have access to engineering resources, or IT resources, or consulting resources — so they will just have a team of three or four people. They can use no-code platforms to make progress quietly. I think we're going to have people who can make their careers in large enterprises by cutting through the bureaucracy — no-code platforms are a huge tool to allow people in big companies to have a big, big impact.

For entrepreneurs, this broader idea of new doors being opened, because of certain tools, just leads to a lot of new ideas. But probably more specifically the fact that the of building those ideas is so much easier that I feel like there's gonna be a lot of folks kind of taking some of those risks on new ideas or new projects or new companies just strictly because the potential is there. For a number of years, a lot of folks have kind of a side business of something that they sort of do for fun, or for money, or for both, it just seems like more of those "side" businesses are going to turn into small, interesting, profitable businesses that could theoretically just be their sole gig.

I think just the broader idea of them not having to worry so much about — if you wanted to build something internal — by nature of being so big, unfortunately, they move slowly, and have maybe some rounds of approvals and just a lot of bureaucracy to deal with internally. But hopefully some of the no-code tools or just the idea of building with no-code tools lets them, pretty quickly, try to experiment with something. Even as compared to the small guys,no-code is giving them a chance to take a risk on something without feeling like they're risking time, which ultimately ends up being money because usually you can build, design and build in no-code in afraction of the time.

[Matt] A common problem that we saw years ago was a lot of people saying, like, “Hey, I've got this idea, but I don't have a technical co founder.” And now you don't need a technical co-founder. If you got the idea, you can be scrappy. I think that what also comes into play as an entrepreneur, or as a small business, is that a lot of these people have limited funding. If you're an entrepreneur, and you're bootstrapping, you're not going to be able to hire a dev team.

And so I think no code, is getting to  the point where it democratizes software development — you don't have to be rich, and you don't have to know how to code, you just have to be willing to learn, and be willing to put in the work. And so I think it opens the doors for all these companies, especially enterprises; I think we're going to start seeing more enterprises come into this space a lot more often.